WHY CAN'T WE SEE HIGHER DIMENSIONS?

As the late physicist Heinz Pagels noted,"One feature of our physical world is so obvious that most people are not even puzzled by it-the fact that space is three dimensional."Almost by instinct alone,we know that any object can be described by giving its height, width  and depth.By giving three numbers,we can locate any position in space.

Einstein extended this concept to include time as the fourth dimension.For example,to meet someone for lunch,we must specify that we should meet at,say,12:30 P.M. in Manhattan; that is, to specify an event, we also need to describe its fourth dimension,the time at which the event takes place.

The problem is,we can't see the fourth spatial dimension.Higher dimensional spaces are impossible to visualize;so it is futile even to try. The prominent German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the inability to "see" the fourth dimension with the inability of a blind man to conceive of the concept of color.      
 
At best, we can use a variety of mathematical tricks,devised by mathematician and mystic Charles Hinton, to visualize shadows of higher-dimensional objects. Other mathematicians, like Thomas Banchoff, chairman of the mathematics department at Brown University, have written computer programs that allow us to manipulate higher-dimensional objects by projecting their shadows onto flat,two-dimensional computer screens.Banchoff's computers allow only a glimpse of the shadows of higher-dimensional objects.

Actually, we cannot visualize higher dimensions because of an accident of evolution. Our brains have evolved to handle myriad emergencies in three dimensions.
Location: Guwahati, Assam, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hinton's Cubes

Image
                                                     Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances.  He was interested in higher dimensions,particularly the fourth dimension.Hinton spent years developing ingenious methods by which the average person and a growing legion of followers, not only professional mathematicians, could see four- dimensional objects.Eventually, he perfected special cubes that if one tried hard enough,could allow one to visualize hypercubes or cubes in four dimensions.Hinton even coined the official name for an unravaled hypercube, a tessaract.A hypercube can't be visualized, but one can unravel a hypercube into its lower components, three dimensional cubes.These cubes, in turn, can be arranged in a three-dimensional cross- a tessaract. It is impossible for us to visualize how to wrap up these cubes to form a hypercube. However, a higher dimensional person can "lift" each cube o
Read more

More skin-like, electronic skin that can feel

  What if we didn't have skin? We would have no sense of touch, no detection of coldness or pain, leaving us inept to respond to any situation. The skin is not just a protective shell for organs, but rather a signaling system for survival that provides information on the external stimuli or temperature, or a meteorological observatory that reports the weat her.  Tactile  receptors, tightly packed throughout the skin, feel the temperature or mechanical stimuli -- such as touching or pinching -- and convert them into electrical signals to the brain. The challenge for electronic skin, being developed for use in artificial skins or humanlike robots like the humanoids, is to make it feel the temperatures and movements like how human skin feels them as much as possible. So far, there are electronic skins that can detect movement or temperature separately, but none are able to recognize both simultaneously like the human skin. A joint research team consisting of POSTECH professor Unyong J
Read more